Geography Majors,

This coming spring semester, the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Science will once again be offering laboratory, research, and field experience to select students in geography (usually juniors or seniors) through our Geography 494, Research Experience for Undergraduates course. The course is a 3-credit hour course, with very flexible hours, and you'll gain experience working on major research areas in the lab, part of the Department of Geography, located in the Science and Engineering Research Facility. ** These credit hours count towards the geography major! ** And this is a great way to start building up your resumé as you start preparing for employment after graduation. Remember, employers will want to see that “extra” effort on your part as an undergraduate above and beyond the normal coursework.

The students need only work 9 hours per week in the laboratory, helping on any of several research projects currently ongoing in the lab. The lab work ranges from working in the wood shop learning to precision sand these valuable samples, to measuring the widths of tree rings to 0.001 mm accuracy using state-of-the-art WinDendro software and hardware. Next semester, we’ll be making several field trips and the selected lab assistants are very welcome to travel with us and help out (all expenses covered and this counts towards your weekly hours). We’ll be traveling to Yorktown Virginia to sample beams from one of the oldest houses in the U.S. (see here: http://rememberyorktown.org/?page_id=609, supposedly built in 1699), to Elizabethton TN to collect samples from the historic structure at Sabine Hill (http://www.tricities.com/news/article_1e71c0a1-8d4a-504e-a641-782bef735ce0.html), and to UT’s Oak Ridge Forest (http://forestry.tennessee.edu/ORForest.html).

 

Although these are not currently paid positions, the students would be preferred choices for any paid positions that do come up in the laboratory in coming academic semesters (and this usually happens, just ask many of our seniors). To learn more about the lab, connect to: http://ltrs.utk.edu/. To see the many undergraduate majors (61 so far) in our department who have worked in the lab, connect here and scroll down to the bottom: http://ltrs.utk.edu/personnel.htm. If you're interested, send me an email expressing your interest and I'll arrange to talk with you in the coming few weeks or so before spring semester starts.

 

Looking forward to hearing from you!

 

Dr. Henri D. Grissino-Mayer

Professor of Geography

Department of Geography

The University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-0925

865.974.6029

 

Web Site  Google Scholar  LinkedIn  Academia.edu